The most important early discovery of mastodon bones
happened in 1739 at a place called (in a gift to thirteen year old boys
everywhere) Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, just a few miles downstream from the
present-day location of Ken Ham's ridiculous creationism museum in Covington.
This was not the first European discovery of mastodon bones, but it was the
first to receive serious scientific attention in the Old World. The story is
simple enough. In 1739, a small French army accompanied by their Indian allies
traveled from Quebec to Louisiana to make war on the Chickasaw Indians. Their
route took them down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to a place near modern-day
Memphis where they were to meet a second army coming up from New Orleans.
Half-way down the Ohio, they camped at the mouth of a small stream. Some ways
up stream, they found some large bones. They collected a few of the bones and,
after the campaign, sent them to Paris. This story has been repeated,
embellished, corrupted, and deconstructed for almost three centuries. Using
some documents that have been largely ignored till now, I hope to clear up a
couple of points and contribute my own version of the discovery and of how word
of the discovery was communicated to the outside, literate world.
First, some history
The French and British adopted different strategies to
exploit North America. The British settled the East Coast and moved west. The
French settled in the St. Lawrence valley and moved to occupy the interior of
the continent through its waterways. Rather late in the game they moved to add
the huge Mississippi drainage to their claim on the St. Lawrence and Great
Lakes drainage. When Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the founder of New
Orleans, tried to exert actual French power up the Mississippi he found his way
blocked by the Chickasaw nation who were settled between modern Natchez and
Mobile and ranged over a much larger area east of the river. The Chickasaw
already had an already established an overland trade relationship with British
merchants from the Carolinas. After several years of raids and counter-raids,
Bienville decided to end the Chickasaw problem once and for all. In 1736, he
raised an army in New Orleans which was to coordinate its attack on the
Chickasaw's villages with a second army sent from the Illinois country. The
Chickasaw separately defeated both armies. Not deterred (or perhaps desperate
for his career) Bienville wrote to Paris for support. Paris gave him everything
he wanted. The government sent cannons, mortars, grenades, thousands of pounds
of powder and shot, and five hundred troops. They also ordered another, larger
army to be raised in Quebec to advance from the north under the command of
Bienville's nephew, Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil. It was this expedition that collected
the bones at Big Bone Lick.
The campaign against the Chickasaw was another failure. The
cannons got stuck in the mud, draught animals died, the French soldiers got
sick, draftees deserted, and the Iroquois, who made up half of Longueuil's
army, made a separate peace with the Chickasaw after exchanging gifts of cheese
and pottery. In early summer 1740, Bienville called off the campaign. He and
Longueuil released their troops to go home. As long as they were in North
America, the French never did manage to defeat the Chickasaw. Longueuil sailed
down the Mississippi to New Orleans with his uncle. From there, he took a ship
back to France. In Paris, he donated the bones to the Cabinet du Roi (the
museum of the King).
Now, some historiography
The story was retold several times over the following two
centuries. By the early Twentieth Century, huge differences existed among the
stories. Three different years for the discovery were being put forth. Three
different versions of the actual discovery and collection of the bones existed.
Some publications included a beautiful etching of a mastodon tooth. In some
versions, an officer known only as Fabri or Fabry was present at the discovery,
might have returned there in the late forties, and either met or wrote a letter
to the Comte du Buffon in 1748 giving a short description of the native legends
surrounding the bones. Another mysterious Frenchman known as Hamel or du Hamel
seems to have known something about the circumstances of the discovery.
In the English language, the most important attempt to make
sense of the various versions came in 1942. This was made by the most
influential American paleontologist of his generation, George Gaylord Simpson.
He wrote two articles on the subject. This version comes from "The
Beginnings of Vertebrate Paleontology in North America," published in the
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society where he wrote:
In 1739 Longueuil was placed in command of French and Indian
troops dispatched from Canada to aid Le Moyne de Bienville, founder and
governor of New Orleans, in an attack on the Chickasaw Indians. ... The
expedition left Montreal in June, 1739, and proceeded to the Ohio River by way
of Oswego, Lake Chautauqua, and the Allegheny River. In late summer of that year
they descended the Ohio and at some distance before reaching the falls, where
Louisville now stands, they found a marsh on the edge of which were large bones
and teeth, representing what they took to be the remains of three elephants.
Longueuil had some of these remains gathered up, including a tusk, a femur, and
at least three molars, and these were carried with the army to its rendezvous
with Bienville, on the Mississippi near the present site of Memphis.
After the successful conclusion of the Chickasaw war in the
spring of 1740, Longueuil went on to New Orleans, taking the fossils with him,
and hence transported them to France at about the end of 1740. The fossils were
placed in the King's collection of curiosities, Cabinet du Roi, whence they
were transferred to the natural history museum in the Jardin des Plantes....
I'll address six questions here.
- When were the bones found?
- Who found the bones?
- How were the bones added to the royal collections?
- Is that etching really one of the teeth?
- Who is du Hamel?
- Who is Fabri?
Other writers have answered some of these questions. My
purpose here is not to claim their work as my own. My goal is to bring their
research together with my own to create what I hope is the most accurate
version.
The questions
When were the bones found? The first published mention of
the bones is on a map entitled "Carte de la Louisiane Cours du Mississipi
et Pais Voisins [Map of Louisiana, the Course of the Mississippi, and
Neighbouring Countries]." It is dated 1744 and was prepared by "N.
Bellin" (Jacques-Nicolas Bellin 1703-1772). Halfway down the "Oyo ou
la Belle Riviere" is the notation "Endroit ou on à trouvé des os
d'Elephant en 1729 [The place where Elephants' bones were found in 1729]."
In 1756, Jean-Bernard Bossu ascended the Mississippi and wrote a series of
letters to a friend in France. While stopping at a fort on the Illinois River,
he was shown a giant molar. The commandant would not let him go to the place,
because of the danger posed by the British, but told him the story behind the
tooth: "In 1735, Canadians, who came to make war with Chickasaws, found
around the Belle River or the Ohio, the skeletons of seven elephants, which
makes me assume that Louisiana is in India..."
Which date is correct: 1729, 1735, or 1739? There is no
doubt that 1739 is the correct date. The 1729 date is simply a mistake by the
mapmaker. Bellin's source for that part of the map was a manuscript map drawn
by Philippe Mandeville who, in turn, used information gathered Joseph-Gaspard
Chaussegros de Lery, an officer with Longueuil. On Mandeville's map,
"Endroit o yl a Ett trouv Les Eaux de plusieurs Elephans pard L arme de
Cannada Command pard Mr. Le Baron de Longuille et o il a fait mettre Les Armes
du Roy en 1739. [Place where the bones of many elephants were found by the army
from Canada commanded by the Baron de Longuille, and where he had the Arms of
the King set up in 1739]." The 3 in the date is smudged and hard to read.
Sylvester Stevens and Donald Kent demonstrated this through the elegantly
simple method of giving a skilled draftsman Mandeville's drawing and asking him
to produce a map. The resulting map also had the date 1729. Bossu's date is
based on the fact that, as mentioned above, the French waged two wars against
the Chickasaw Nation. Longueuil's 1739 expedition down the Ohio was during the
second of these campaigns. During the earlier war, Pierre D'Artaguiette led a
force from the Illinois country during the winter of 1735-6. He never passed by
Big Bone Lick.
Bellin's 1744 map incorrectly dating the discovery to 1729. Source.
Who found the bones? This one is both easy and hard to
answer. At various times it has been claimed that the French found the bones,
that their Indian allies found the bones, or that the Indians told the French
about the bones after which the French went to the spot and collected them.
Simpson says "they" found them, referring to the whole army, and
Longueuil ordered the bones collected. There are no surviving records of the
discovery written by Longueuil. There aren't even references by French
scientists that such a report ever existed. There is, however a note from the
mysterious Fabry. It reads in its entirety: "Baron de Longueuil left
Canada with a large party of French and Indians to come and join M. de
Bienville on the Mississippi at an appropriate location to assemble and march
against the Chickasaw Indians. M. Longueuil, instead of taking the usual route
through Detroit [to the Illinois River], portaged five leagues from Lake Erie,
and went down the Ohio River by canoe to its juncture with the Mississippi,
thirty-five leagues above the Illinois. When he was nearly halfway down the
Ohio River, a few Indians who had gone hunting from their camp found the
remains of three large animals on the edge of a swamp. They brought back to the
camp a thigh bone and tusks that are believed to be from an elephant, and that
M. de Longueuil brought to France in 1740. M. Lignery, Lieutenant in Canada,
who was with M. Longueuil, wrote a Journal of the campaign, in which he
detailed the discovery of bones in question." Fabry is not is very clear
and to the point. The bones were found by an Indian hunting party and brought
to the French. There is no mention of the French going to site or doing any
collecting, though the mysterious du Hamel (below) gives me reason to think
they did. Presented with mysterious giant bones, wouldn't you have gone and
taken a look?
"Indians" is a pretty vague term. Is it possible
to narrow that down a bit? In her book, Fossil Legends of the First Americans,
Adrienne Mayor attempts to do just that. Longueuil's force was made up 442 men.
Of these, 123 were French and Canadian and 319 were from allied Indian nations.
According to Mayor, the nations living in the area where Longueuil would have
been recruiting that were most likely to join him were the Iroquois, Wyandot,
and Abenaki. Of these, she believes the Abenaki are the most likely
discoverers. Many of them were Christians and spoke French, making them more
attuned to know what might interest the French. The Abenaki also had a history
of joining French expeditions and, thus might have been familiar with the
attractions of lands outside their home territory. Mayor is comfortable enough
in this conclusion that, after laying out her reasons, she refers to the
discoverers as Abenaki for the rest of her book. Based on the information
available to her, it's a solid conclusion. I've had no reason to question it
since I first read her book six years ago.
That is, until last fall when, while writing my chapter about the
mastodon, I came across a set of documents from the campaign. In 1922, the
Archivist of Quebec published these documents in the annual report of the
Archives. One of the documents is the roster of the army that departed Montreal
and two others are reports from Longueuil while on the road. Unfortunately,
both of the reports were written before he reached Big Bone Lick and do not
describe the discovery. The roster names all of the officers and cadets who
traveled with him and breaks down the rest of the army into soldiers, draftees,
and Indian allies by nation. The latter are: 237 Iroquois, 50 Abenaki, and 32
Algonquin and Nippising. That's still a reasonable number of Abenaki. Let's
move on to Longueuil's two reports. By August 4, the army had made their way up
the St. Lawrence River, crossed Lake Ontario, portaged around Niagara Falls and
made their way to the point where they were to portage over to the Ohio
drainage. In this report he says that a large part ("une grand
partie") of the Abenaki and Two Mountain Iroquois deserted when they were
passing the English settlement at Oswego, New York, seduced by English brandy.
He put the total at around seventy, but hoped they could be replaced with other
Iroquois recruited in the Ohio country. Six days later, having completed the
portage into the Ohio basin, he wrote that the actual number of deserters was
closer to ninety. The Abenaki and Two Mountain Iroquois contingents of his army
amounted to 101 men.
It's not likely that there were enough Abenaki left to make
up a hunting party large enough to feed 350 men. But, if not the Abenaki, then
who? Longueuil wrote that he hoped to recruit more Iroquois in the valley. None
of the records I'm aware of say whether he was successful in that or not.
However, there is a piece of evidence that indicates who he did recruit. In
1749, ten years after Longueuil passed through, competition between the British
and French to be the dominant influence in the Ohio country was heating up. It
would soon flare into the open warfare that Bossu was warned to avoid. In that
year, the French sent Jean Baptiste Celoron de Blainville down the Ohio to
convince the local Indians to stick with the French. For some reason, Anglo
historians prefer to ignore his title and call him Celoron. That might be
because he was kind of a jerk. Celoron was a veteran of the Chickasaw wars who,
then, had brought his own contingent of French and Indians from the Illinois
country. Celoron's style on this mission was to scold the heads of the villages
he passed and then hand out gifts. His final stop was a large Shawnee settlement
at the mouth of the Scioto River. He estimated the settlement as having 80-100
households. Celoron's welcome was underwhelming. First the Shawnee tried to
scare him off with a show of arms (which Celoron dryly notes were probably
provided by the British). Next, they erected fortifications around the village.
When they finally allowed Celoron in to address them, he scolded them for their
bad hospitality. He demanded to know what had happened to the good will they
had when, "ten years ago, Monsieur de Longueil (sic) passed by here on his
way to the Chuachias [Chickasaws]. You came out to meet him, and you showed him
in every way the kindness of your hearts. A company of young men also
volunteered to accompany him."
This, I think, is the true identity of the discoverers. The
Shawnee settlement at the mouth of the Scioto was about 130 miles upstream from
the Big Bone Lick and the lick was known to the Shawnee along the Ohio. In the
summer of 1755, a group of Shawnee warriors attacked the small settlement of
Draper's Meadow in western Virginia. Several settlers were killed and five were
taken prisoner. One of the prisoners was Mary Draper Ingles. Ingles was taken
west to an encampment of French and Shawnee just above mouth of the Bone Lick
stream. She was then taken to the salt lick and put to work boiling water to
collect salt. Her later escape and journey back to Virginia has been retold by
historians, novelized, and made into more than one movie. Her story shows that
in 1755, sixteen years after Longueuil passed, the lick was well known to the
Shawnee.
There is one final question about the discoverers that has
been insufficiently examined. What was the motivation of the hunters in
bringing the bones to the camp? In the narrative that assumes the hunters had
no previous knowledge of the bones, the logical course of events is that the
found a salt lick, which is a place where buffalo and deer would gather, then
hunkered down, waiting for the game to come to them. During this period of
quiet observation, they saw the bones and decided to bring them back to the
camp. Why? They thought the French would be interested in them. In the
narrative that assumes the hunters did have previous knowledge of the bones,
the logical course of events is that some of them went directly to the salt
lick to collect bones, while the rest of the party hunted. In either case, why
did they bring them back? This is a good question. If they had joined the
expedition a few days earlier, as I believe, their motive might have been as
much to impress the other Indians as it was to give the French something they
might be interested in. Maybe more so. How ethnocentric is it for
Euro-Americans to assume that we were the intended audience for the bones?
Their retrieval might have been motivated by the newest members of the expedition
trying to impress everyone in the expedition, not just the French.
How were the bones added to the royal collections? Most
accounts are very specific that the bones were donated directly to the museum.
Those bones were one femur, one broken tusk, and three molars. The note from
the mysterious Fabry, quoted above, mentions only a femur and tusks (plural).
Fabry's note appears twice in the literature of the time, both by the same
writer: Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton. Daubenton was hired by Buffon in 1742 to
assist him in writing his massive encyclopedia of nature, Histoire naturelle,
générale et particulière, and to catalog the various royal collections. In
1762, Buffon began working on the volume his history that included the
elephant. That same year, presumably as a result of his research for Buffon,
Daubenton presented a paper to the French academy about the bones discovered on
the Ohio. In this paper he only indirectly tells the story of their discovery:
"Baron de Longueuil going out of Lake Erie in 1739 with a large party of
French & Indians, went down the river Oyo on his canoes up to where it
joins the Mississippi, thirty-five miles below the Illinois: while they were
camped halfway down the Oyo, some Indians out hunting, found the bones of three
large animals on the edge of a swamp, and brought to camp the femur in question
and tusks that they [presumably the French] thought came from an elephant, and
that M. de Longueuil brought to France in 1740." This is a paraphrasing of
the note from someone he identifies only as Fabry. Later he writes that
"M. du Hamel, of the Academy, told me that M. de Longueuil had brought
from Canada very large molars, these are in the Royal collection."
Daubenton concluded that the teeth and the tusk and femur
came from two different animals. The former he determined were from a relative
of the hippo and the latter from a relative of the elephant. In Buffon's
Natural History the sections on each of those animals include Daubenton's
inventory of the royal collections. True to his earlier conclusions, Daubenton
describes the femur and tusk with the elephant and the three teeth with the
hippopotamus. In the inventory entry for the femur, he gives the full text of
Fabry's note. Just as before, this is followed by the statement that "M.
Hamel, of the Royal Academy of Sciences, said that Mr. Longueuil also brought
in 1740, very-large molars that had been found in Canada, perhaps along with
the tusk and femur [singular] I have just mentioned." In the next volume,
in the section on the hippo, he says the three teeth came from Canada with the
femur and tusk. Daubenton's three entries agree with each other in the most
important details. These are: Fabry says the bones were discovered by an Indian
hunting party and that they brought a femur and tusks to the camp, there is
only one tusk in the collections delivered by Longueuil, and that he learned
about the teeth from du Hamel (or Hamel), not from Fabry or Longueuil.
Is that etching really one of the teeth? In 1752, a Swiss
geologist, Jean Etienne Guettard, presented a paper before the French Academy.
The topic was a comparison of the geology of Switzerland and North America.
Guettard included a short section on the fossils of North America. In it he
writes, "I should have so much desired to compare a large fossil tooth
that is place that is marked on maps of Canada as the canton where elephant
bones are found. What animal is it? And does it resemble fossil teeth of this
size that we have found in different parts of Europe? [i.e. mammoths]. I give
this figure; the research we do on it later should shed some light on the
subject." The maps he refers to can only mean Bellin's, which had been
published twice by then. When his paper was published four years after its
initial presentation, it included two plates of a giant tooth and a small
Crinoid fossil. Every published example of the etching that I've seen, except
one, identifies it as one of the teeth Longueuil donated.
Guettard's tooth. He identifies the small crinoid fossil on the lower left as a moth. Source.
There are some good reasons to doubt that. First, Guettard
never mentions Longueuil or the royal collections. Second, he says he would
like to examine a tooth, not that he already has examined one. I suspect the
image was something he added to his paper before publication in 1756. Third,
the tooth doesn't match any of the descriptions Daubention gave for the teeth.
I'm not the only person who has had doubts about the illustration. In 2002,
Pascal Tassy went through the fossil collection at the Museum trying to
identify Longueuil's bones. In the 260 years since their donation, the bones
were cataloged three times and given different numbers each time. Old numbers
rubbed away, tags fell off, and the collections were moved several times. But,
Tassy was successful and located all three teeth with traces of their Daubenton
numbers visible using a black light. He also located the tooth in Guettard's
illustration. After some detective work, he was able to match the tooth to a
number in an 1861 inventory with the notation "Collection Drée." From
here, he was able to find an illustration of the tooth and a reference to Drée
in Georges Cuvier's Recherches sur les Ossemens fossiles (1806). When Buffon
published an illustration of teeth from the Ohio in 1778 and this tooth was not
one of them.
Guettard gives one possible clue as to the origin of the
tooth. In the published version of his paper, he says that Jean François
Gautier, a prominent Canadian naturalist, sent him a note commenting on his
draft. Gautier wrote, "All those who have been to this place, who have
seen the skeletons or bones of these animals, relate that the skeletons are
almost complete: we do not assume that they include the teeth, because these
are the only parts that we can easily carry away; the other bones are too large
and too heavy." Gautier adds that he will have Father Bonnecamp, a Jesuit
of impeccable scientific credentials, make drawings of the skeletons during his
next trip down the Ohio. Bonnecamp was part of Celoron's 1749 expedition. He
never made a second expedition down the Ohio, but Gautier's interest in the
bones might have led one of the men to acquire one of the teeth from another
traveler.
The likely history of the tooth is that Gautier acquired it
sometime before 1756 and sent it to one of his scientific correspondents in
France, possibly even Guettard. The tooth was in private collections until some
point between 1778 and 1806 when it was either donated to the Museum or
confiscated by the revolutionary authorities.
Who is du Hamel? This is the easiest question to answer.
Daubenton describes du Hamel as being "of the Royal Academy of
Sciences." This makes him Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau who was elected
to the Academy in 1738 and served three times as its president. That he knew
about the teeth, which are not mentioned in Fabry's letter, raises the
possibility that he was present when Longueuil donated them. Like Guettard,
Duhamel was a regular correspondent of Gautier's, which makes him another
possible recipient of the fourth tooth.
Who is Fabri? Stanley Hedeen, in his book Big Bone Lick,
refers to "A Frenchman by the name of Fabri [who] was likely at the Lick
in the 1740s when he saw 'heads and skeletons of an enormous quadruped called
by the Savages, the father of oxen.'" Mayor writes, "Little is known
about Fabri except that he participated in the campaign from Montreal down the
Ohio and on to New Orleans..."
Hedeen cites no source; Mayor cites Cuvier and Henry Chapman Mercer's
The Lenape Stone (1885). Mercer writes that the tradition that the bones were
those of a monster "appears in the song tradition of the ‘Father of Oxen,’
from Canada, and in a monster tradition from Louisiana, both spoken of by
Fabri, a French officer, in a letter to Buffon from America in 1748."
Cuvier mentions Fabri twice. His first reference reads: "We have three
such [teeth] at the Museum, previously brought back by Fabri." He refers
to Daubenton's catalog as his source. The second reference reads: "A
French officer named Fabri announced to Buffon in 1748 that the Indians looked
upon these bones scattered in various parts of Canada and Louisiana as coming
from a particular animal they called the father of oxen." For this he
cites Buffon (1778) as his source. What Buffon wrote was, "In the year
1748, M. Fabri, who had made great excursions into the northern parts of
Louisiana and the southern regions Canada, informed me that he had seen heads
and skeletons of an enormous quadruped, called by the Savages the father of
Oxen."
Except for Duhamel's mention of the teeth, everything we
know about the discovery of the mastodon bones at Big Bone Lick comes from
Fabry/Fabri. And, all the information we have about Fabri ultimately comes from
Buffon and Daubenton. Daubenton, who wrote first, quotes the note describing
the discovery and says that it was written by M. Fabry, as he spells it. In the
note, Fabry does not say he was present at the discovery; he refers Daubenton
to Lieutenant Lignery for details of the discovery. In my reading, by referring
to Lignery's journal for more information, it seems likely that Fabri was not
at Big Bone Lick and that Lignery was his source of information. Buffon,
writing sixteen years after Daubenton, says Fabri, was a great traveler who saw
the "heads and skeletons of an enormous quadruped." Buffon makes no
mention of Longueuil. Buffon gives us one solid detail that might help identify
Fabri. He met him personally in 1748.
Looking at the roster of officers who left Montreal with
Longueuil, I find no mention of a Fabri, Fabry, or any other variant spelling.
I do, however find Lignery. François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery (or
Ligneris), a major, not a lieutenant, was later an important commander in the
frontier wars with the British.
We haven't reached a dead end on Fabri. I finally located
Fabri in the online Dictionary of Louisiana Biography put out by the Louisiana
Historical Association. He is André Fabry de la Bruyère, the secretary to
Longueuil's uncle, Governor Bienville. Fabry participated in both Chickasaw
campaigns as part of the New Orleans contingents. He was an explorer who tried
to establish a trade route between New Orleans and Santa Fe. He was also in
Paris for most of the years 1747 and 1748 when Buffon mentions meeting him.
The sources
After eliminating secondary retellings, I believe these are
the most dependable sources to use in reconstructing the story of the bones'
discovery and final fate.
Fabry's note as quoted by Daubenton in Buffon's Histoire
naturelle, générale et particulière, vol. 11, 1764.
Buffon's memory of the conversation with Fabry in 1748
recounted in Buffon's Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, contenant
les epoques de la nature, supplement vol. 6, 1778.
The campaign roster, and two letters of Gilles Hocquart, the
intendant of Canada, repeating Longueuil's letters of August 6 and 10 found in
Rapport de l'archiviste de la province de Québec, 1922.
Celoron's speech scolding the Shawnee from his journal in
Galbreath, C.B. ed. Expedition of Celoron to the Ohio Country in 1749, 1920.
Daubenton's descriptions and analyses of the bones and teeth
in Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences avec les mémoires de mathématique
& de physique, 1762 (pub. 1764); Histoire naturelle, générale et
particulière, vol. 11, 1764; and Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière,
vol. 12, 1764.
The analysis of Mandeville's map in Sylvester K. Stevens and
Donald H. Kent, eds. The Expedition of Baron de Longueuil, 1941.
The rediscovery of the bones by Tassy in "L’émergence du
concept d’espèce fossile: Le mastodonte américain (Proboscidea, Mammalia) entre
clarté et confusion." Geodiversitas 24, 2002.
The best source possible for the discovery would be
Lignery's journal, but I have been unable to find any trace of it. A later
journal of his is in the Canadian archives, but not this one.
My version
Leaving out all of my historian's probablys, it-is-likelys,
and it's-safe-to-assumes, this is how I reconstruct the events as a story.
By the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, France was
established in the drainage area of the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes.
Some of their agents had even portaged from Lake Michigan into the Illinois
River valley and established trading posts there. The next stage of their
American expansion was from their Caribbean colonies to the Gulf coast and
Mississippi Delta from whence the claimed the entire drainage area of the
Mississippi River. In the 1720s, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the founder
and governor of New Orleans, began expanding French influence up the river with
the goal of hooking up with the French in the Illinois country and, ultimately,
with Quebec. Making such a connection was not just to the economic advantage of
the colonies; it was an important move in the geopolitical Great Game being
played by France and Britain for control of the continent. Connecting the two
colonies would contain the British on the East Coast giving the French a chance
to monopolize everything north a New Spain (Mexico).
At first the plan went well. The settlements at Baton Rouge
and Natchez were established a few years after New Orleans and good relations
were established with the Choctaw nation. However, above Natchez, their
expansion was halted, first by the Natchez nation and then by the Chickasaw.
Both of these nations already had established trade relations with the British
out of the Carolinas. When attempts to lure the Natchez into the French orbit
failed, they resorted to force. By 1731, the French had destroyed or scattered
the Natchez. The Chickasaw proved to be a more difficult problem. In 1735,
Bienville gave up on negotiations and decided that, once again, war was the
only way to deal with his intransigent neighbors. A great campaign was planned
for the spring of the next year. The plan was a simple one: one army would come
down the Mississippi from the Illinois country while a second would come from
New Orleans overland through modern Alabama and they would crush the Chickasaw
between them. The actual campaign was a miserable failure. The two armies
failed to coordinate their actions and the Chickasaw defeated them one at a
time inflicting a great number of casualties on the French. Bienville returned
to New Orleans to plan another campaign.
Bienville began his second campaign in the summer of 1739.
This time, the New Orleans force was reinforced with troops from France,
artillery, and siege weapons. A second force, under Pierre-Joseph Céloron de
Blainville, was to come down from the Illinois country while a third, commanded
by Bienville's nephew, Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil, was to come down from
Quebec. Longueuil's force was made up of 123 French and Canadian and 319 from
allied Indian nations (186 de Sault Iroquois, 51 Two Mountains Iroquois, 32
Algonquin and Nipissing, and 50 Abenaki). Their planned route was to be almost
entirely by water up the St. Lawrence, across Lake Ontario, a portage around
Niagara Falls, across Lake Erie to a place where they could portage into the
headwaters of the Ohio River, and down that river to the Mississippi. This
route allowed the expedition to perform a second service to the authorities in
Montreal and New Orleans. The Ohio River was barely known to the French. By
following this shorter route, Longueuil was able to assess whether it was
superior to the established route through the Great Lakes and over the Chicago
portage into the Illinois River. For this purpose he was provided with a young
surveyor, Joseph-Gaspard Chaussegros de Lery.
The expedition left Montreal in two detachments on June 16
and 30 by birch bark canoe. On August 4, they reached the place where they were
to make their portage to Lake Chautauqua on the headwaters of the Ohio. Before
making the portage, Longueuil sent a progress report to the governor in
Montreal, the Marquis de Beauharnais. In this report he says that a large part
("une grand partie") of the Abenaki and Two Mountain Iroquois
deserted when they were passing the English settlement at Oswego, New York,
seduced by English brandy. He estimated their number at about 70. A week later,
having completed the portage he sent a second report to Beauharnais estimating
the number of deserters at 90. He hoped to make up for the desertions by
recruiting more Iroquois along the way. There is no record that he had any
success with the Iroquois, but he did recruit a number of Shawnee at Scioto
Village.
One hundred thirty miles downstream from Scioto Village, the
expedition made camp at the mouth of a creek on the southern bank of the river.
De Lery noted on his map of the Ohio River that Longueuil made a formal showing
of the Arms of the King, claiming the land. De Lery called their camp,
"[The] place where the bones of many elephants were found." The bones
were those of the American mastodon. One of the officers, Major François-Marie
Le Marchand de Lignery, wrote in his journal the circumstances of how these
bones were found. A party of Shawnee, who were familiar with the country, went
hunting to reprovision the army. Somewhat later, come of them returned bringing
with them giant tusks and a femur that the French officers identified as coming
from an elephant. The hunters said that there were three skeletons of this
animal in a salt lick not far from the camp. A group of officers went to look
at the site and collected some more bones as souvenirs. Longueuil collected
three teeth. The bones, tusks, and teeth were added to Longueuil's baggage and
the army continued on their way to their rendezvous with the armies of Celoron
and Bienville, which they made at the end of November.
The campaign against the Chickasaw was no more successful
than the previous one. This time, rather than defeating the French in battle,
the Chickasaw wore them down by refusing to engage them. By the summer of 1740,
almost 500 French troops had been felled by disease and most of their Indian
auxiliaries had abandoned them. Bienville called off the campaign and released
the armies—at least, that part that hadn't already deserted—to go home.
Longueuil joined his uncle and escorted the sick soldiers downriver to New
Orleans. The bones from the Ohio were not a secret. Longueuil's officers told
Bienville’s officers about them and maybe showed off their own souvenirs. One
conversation that we know for sure happened was between Lignery and Bienville’s
secretary, André Fabry de la Bruyère. Lignery referred to his journal while
telling the story. We’re lucky that he did talk to Fabry because the journal
has not survived.
Longueuil returned to France in the fall with the bones and teeth
where he donated them to the Cabinet du Roi (the museum of the King). At the
time of their donation, the bones failed to attract much attention. Academy
member Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau was the only French scientist who was
aware of the donation at the time. It is from him that we know of the three
teeth that were donated along with the tusk and femur. It's curious that
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the new director of the Jardin des
Plantes, which included the Cabinet only learned about the donation when Fabry
spent the winter in Paris in 1747-8. Fabry wrote a short note describing the
discovery as he heard it from Lignery and orally told Buffon about legends
along the Mississippi calling the skeletons the father of buffalo ("le pere
aux beufs" which translates literally as "the father of oxen").
Buffon's ignorance of the discovery is doubly curious considering word of the
discovery had been published twice by then on maps using de Lery's survey of
the Ohio River. New maps of unexplored parts of the world were not trivial
matters at the time.
In the spring of 1748, around the same time that he met
Fabry, Buffon published the first volume of his encyclopedic Histoire
naturelle, générale et particulière. The project would eventually run to
thirty-six volumes and occupy the rest of his life. Buffon’s assistant at the
Jardin, Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, helped with the project by writing an
inventory of related items in the Cabinet for each chapter Buffon wrote. It
wasn't until the early sixties that they got around to the chapters they deemed
relevant to the Ohio bones and teeth. On examining them, Daubenton found them
interesting enough that he wrote a major paper on them, which he presented to
the Academy in August 1762. Daubenton compared the bones and teeth to those of
an Asian elephant that had once been part of the king’s menagerie and to
mammoth bones that Joseph-Nicolas Delisle had brought from Russia in 1747.
Daubenton's conclusion was that all three sets of bones represented a single
species and that the differences between them were attributable to age and sex.
For the teeth, he came up with a different conclusion. The Ohio teeth in no way
resembled the mammoth or elephant teeth in the royal collection. After some
study of other teeth in the collection, he decided they most resembled those of
a hippopotamus—a giant, carnivorous hippopotamus.
Daubenton’s paper and the volumes of Buffon's Natural
History dealing with elephants and hippos were all published in 1764. Had they
studied the Ohio bones and teeth earlier, their publications would have had
much greater influence than they did. But, during the years between Longueuil
depositing them and Daubenton writing about them, the bones and teeth of the
Ohio came to the attention of other learned Europeans. The British learned
about the lick and its bones as early as 1744 when Robert Smith opened a
trading post on the Great Miami River, which debouches into the Ohio a few
miles above the salt lick. In 1751, he gave two teeth to surveyor Christopher
Gist. All through the fifties, other merchants and travelers brought back teeth
and stories. Important men in Philadelphia, New York, and London heard these
stories and received teeth as gifts. At some point between 1752 and 1756, a
Swiss member of the Academy, Jean Etienne Guettard, learned about the teeth and
the lick and had a detailed engraving of a tooth made. The tooth was not one of
Longueuil's. The Academy published the engraving in its journal.
Longueuil was not the first European to encounter fossils of
unknown mammals and realize that they were something worthy of comment. That
distinction goes to Cortez and his officers in 1519 when they were shown the
femur of a relative of the mastodon by Tlaxcalan elders. They took the bone and
sent it to the king of Spain. Nor do Europeans deserve credit for realizing
that they were something worthy of comment. That distinction goes to the Native
Americans of North, South and Central America who showed them to the Europeans.
The importance of Longueuil's recognition and collection is that these were the
first bones of large vertebrates from the New World to be carefully studied and
written about. Guettard made only a short mention of his tooth in a paper on
the geology of Canada making the comment that he would like to know more about
it. The British passed teeth and bones round and discussed them in letters, but
no one made a detailed study of them for publication until several years after Daubenton's
three articles came out.
In 1942, the American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson
made a point of dismissing the interest of Native Americans in the bones they
encountered and wrote that Longueuil's moment at Big Bone Lick was the
beginning of North American vertebrate paleontology. Simpson’s point is valid
only if we speak specifically of the European scientific discipline of
paleontology. Regardless of how many qualifications are applied to it, there is
no denying that the collection of the Big Bone Lick mastodon fossils and
donation to the Cabinet du Roi was an important milestone on the road to
understanding extinct proboscideans.
Note: I wrote a big sloppy version of the first part of this
post last fall while trying to figure out the sequence of events for the
mastodon chapter of my book. Last week Adrienne Mayor posted a
short essay on
Cuvier and the mastodon that made a brief mention of the 1739 discovery. This
inspired me to whack my historiographical notes into a coherent (I hope) post.
While doing so, I noticed a few points that I missed last time and am making
appropriate corrections to the chapter.
